The Dark Side of Project Based Learning

My school, along with the family of schools we are part of, has been looking seriously at Project Based Learning (PBL).

A few weeks ago our district of schools had a PD day on the topic.

It just so happens that we were in the middle of preparing for our spring musical. We had wanted to make use of Matthew West's excellent song Do Something to conclude the program. Then someone suggested that we make our own.

Foolishly I volunteered to take the project on using my grade 7 class. We had a little more than two weeks to complete the entire project on time.

Here's what they created.

I learned a few hard lessons during this project.

1. It is messy
• My classroom was a mess throughout this project, so was the room down the hall we turned into our photo studio
• The schedule in my room went out the window. Regular Bible, math, science, and any other subject was ignored in order to meet the deadline. This was particularly difficult to make work with the Arrowsmith students in my room who have very strict schedules.
2. Some students really didn't like it
• For those students who had figure out the rules of school, who knew what they had to do to earn an "A", who know how to give the answers the teacher wants, this project was very hard. These students were pushed outside their comfort zone.  
3. Parents don't necessarily understand it
• A project like this is not school as normal. For some parents this is uncomfortable. 
4. It's not in the "official" curriculum
• If I had to align this with the "official" curriculum I'd have to get creative to fit it in somewhere. (I could do it though!)
• It has it's own curriculum. Things like productivity, collaboration, creativity, meeting deadlines, and more.
5. The project revealed that students and I didn't really know how to do this.
• My students struggled to be productive. In one case I assigned a small task that should have taken 20 to 30 minutes to complete, 3 days later I noticed they were still working on it! They just didn't have any practice at really buckling down and getting to work.
• There were far too many of them who wanted to be the General in the army and not enough who knew how to be Soldiers and take orders. I'd walk into the photo studio and there would be 3 or 4 people in there, who weren't supposed to be, telling people what to do and no one actually doing the work!
6. I threw student work away because it wasn't acceptable.
• The work had to be excellent. Early on I had to throw away 1/3 of the posers they made for the video because they were sloppy, messy, and not well done.
• Students were not used to working with the expectation that their work had to be good.
• We ended up redoing some of the video segments 4 times before they were acceptable. (Some of the ones in the video we still would have liked to redo, but we ran out of time.)
7. It consumed me as a teacher
• Any other project, task, or assignment I had got put on the back burner. I marked next to nothing, and fell behind in a few other projects as I spent every minute working on this.
• I spent more time at school working on this than normal and I already work a lot. This had a cost with my family.

So my experience with this PBL project was messy, uncomfortable, off the beaten path, chaotic, stressful, and tiring.

And I loved it.